[OpenLayers-Dev] uml class diagram of OL 2.6?

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 04:59:58PM -0500, Erik Uzureau wrote:
> Really it's not such a difficult thing to do, it's more just
> repetitive work, which can be frustrating/tiring.
> 
> All I did was go through every .js file and make a new node for every class.
> Under each class I listed all the APIMethod/APIFunctions and all the
> APIPropertys.
> 
> What makes it frustrating is that it is tedious to keep up this sort of a
> model.
> 
> At the bottom of this page:
> http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/Documentation
> 
> you can see a model that cr5 generated automatically from the code.
> 
> I can't remember offhand what he used to generate it -- pretty sure it
> was something he wrote himself -- but I think if we are going to put
> any real effort into this, we should be using his tool... at least for
> what amounts to the data entry part.  Moving around the nodes so that
> everything looks nice... that can be done afterwards.
> 
> One thing is for sure, though, is that no one should burn any cycles on an
> actual model until we put out the 2.7 release... or at least the rc1 thereof.
> 
> Chris? What do you say.

"Graphical tools for visualizing code suck" :)

More seriously, I have no desire to maintain any code going forward that
will graph out the OpenLayers library. I simply don't see the purpose of
such a tool. The tool I made is called 'oldot', and it generates a
.dot file of the OpenLayers class tree. (.dot files are the file format
used by Graphviz, a common library for doing drawing of things like
this.)

If someone wants to build a tool, that's fine; I'm not at all convinced
that mine is a good one. In general, I don't think the lack of UML
diagrams of the OL source code serves as anything other than evidence
that the people working with the OL code are simply not concerned with
building UML diagrams in order to visualize the code, and I truthfully
can't understand what such a graph would serve to demonstrate. 

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
MetaCarta